His public commentary has appeared in several periodicals such as The Daily Telegraph and The Spectator. Roberts himself is best known for his 2009 non-fiction work The Storm of War.[4][5] A look at the Second World War covering historical factors such as Hitler's rise to power and the organisation of Nazi Germany, the book has been lauded by[5] and received the British Army Military Book of the Year Award for 2010.[4]

Elsewhere, his work has sometimes been criticised by, for example, The Economist who described one book as "a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices, with sneers at those who do not share them and with errors".[6] However, much of Roberts' work, including his 2018 biography of Winston Churchill, has been widely praised; the Sunday Times, for example, called the Churchill biography 'Undoubtedly the best single-volume life of Churchill ever written.' [7]

In his writings, Roberts supports an interventionist role for the UK in global diplomatic and military affairs, advocating "an active part in defending decency" through the UK's being "one of the world’s foremost moral policemen".[8]

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Roberts was born in Hammersmith, west London, the son of Kathleen (née Hillery-Collings) and business executive Simon Roberts.[1][9] Simon Roberts, from Cobham, Surrey, inherited the Job's Dairy milk business and also owned the United Kingdom contingent of Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants. His parents would later sell their interest in the aforementioned milk business in 1987. A prolific reader as a child, he soon gained a passion for history, particularly for dramatic works relating to "battles, wars, assassinations and death".[3]

Roberts attended Cranleigh School as a child. However, as he later revealed, he also was "horrifically bullied" by other pupils, at one point being locked in a clothes cupboard and made to think that the building was on fire, and he sought relief partially through alcohol. Though he eventually achieved three As in his A-levels, Roberts ended up being forced to leave Cranleigh due to bouts of intoxication as well as carrying out minor acts of vandalism.[10]

He is divorced from his first wife, Camilla Henderson, with whom he had two children.[3][11] Roberts is married to businesswoman Susan Gilchrist, CEO of the corporate communications firm Brunswick Group LLP and a Governor of the South Bank Centre. They currently live in London.

Roberts' analysis of the Second World War convinced him that the Nazi German government had significant advantages in military organisation and economic power early in the war. He has argued that, if someone other than Adolf Hitler had control of the nation's military strategy, the country would likely have forgone a costly direct invasion of Soviet territory (which occurred through Operation Barbarossa) and instead would have swept through Mediterranean territories before trying to seal off British-controlled Middle East areas. Thus, Roberts believes, the likely morale-building victories against the comparatively weak forces to the southeast could have allowed Hitler to essentially "win" the war.[5] The other key strategic mistake, according to Roberts, was the German declaration of war against the United States, which happened only four days after the Pearl Harbor attacks and which the Nazi regime was not obliged to do. Roberts argues that after the declaration, Germany could not keep the U.S. war-making economic machine at bay.[5] In short, Roberts believes that the mistakes, delusions and exaggerated self-confidence complexes that the fascist dictatorship fostered proved its undoing.[12]

Roberts has also stated that he views Joseph Stalin's control of the Soviet forces as having been disastrous to the allied efforts against the Axis powers. He noted that Stalin's obsessive tactics of killing his own men for ideological reasons cost him thousands upon thousands of troops. In the Battle of Stalingrad alone, Soviet forces killed the equivalent of two full divisions of their own personnel.[5]

In terms of more recent history, Roberts whole-heartedly embraced Thatcherism. He has remained a staunch backer of Prime MinisterMargaret Thatcher and her socio-political legacy.[3] In Roberts' opinion, Thatcher's insight to push the UK into a path in which it kept out of the Euro while still having strong ties to European economies has been validated by the Eurozone crisis in the aftermath of the world economic recession. After Tony Blair resigned as Prime Minister, Roberts assessed him as an "exemplary war leader" with his "vigorous prosecution of the War against Terror", which would leave him regarded as a "highly successful prime minister".[13] Besides his sceptical approach to the European Union as an institution,[14] he also holds a dim opinion of the United Nations, believing that the strength of oppressive and autocratic regimes in the UN's sub-groups make it sluggish and corrupt.[15] In the 2016 UK Referendum on the EU, Roberts backed a Leave vote.[16]

Roberts supports a strong American military and has generally argued in favour of close relations between the Anglosphere nations. As an advocate for the general principle of democratic pluralism, he has argued that "[s]neered at for being 'simplistic' in his reaction to 9/11, Bush's visceral responses to the attacks of a fascistic, totalitarian death cult will be seen as having been substantially the right ones" in the long run. In many writings, he has come out in support of neo-conservative influenced socio-political viewpoints.[3]

During the buildup to the Iraq War, Roberts supported the proposed invasion, arguing that anything less would be tantamount to appeasement, comparing Tony Blair to Winston Churchill in his "astonishing leadership". He additionally argued that acting against Saddam Hussein was in line with the "Pax Americana realpolitik that has kept the great powers at peace since the Second World War, despite the collapse of communism".[15]

Roberts wrote in 2003 "For Churchill, apotheosis came in 1940; for Tony Blair, it will come when Iraq is successfully invaded and hundreds of weapons of mass destruction are unearthed from where they have been hidden by Saddam's henchmen."[17] When such weapons were not found, Roberts still defended the invasion for larger strategic reasons while arguing that his past views were based on credible assessments from "the French, Chinese, Israeli and Russian intelligence agencies" as well as other sources. He also believes that history will judge US President George W. Bush a success.[18]

He has defended the use of waterboarding by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), saying that "sometimes the defense of liberty requires making some pretty unpalatable decisions" and viewed the policies of torture-based tactics used by some allied forces during WWII as having promoted their eventual victory.[2] Roberts believes that the Iraq War involved the English-speaking peoples in "an existential war for the survival of their way of life" and that the large-scale conflicts involving Islamic extremism had reached a point in which "this struggle against Islamofascism is the fourth world war", the Cold War being the 'third world war', while "the English-speaking peoples find themselves in the forefront of protecting civilization".[19]

Roberts later commented in 2009, on the human cost of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, that Britain had "lost fewer soldiers than on a normal weekend on the Western Front".[18] Writing for the Daily Mail, Roberts remarked, "The emasculation of British foreign policy after the Iraq War and during the ongoing Afghan War is an extraordinary phenomenon, considering how few Britons gave their lives in those places compared with other wars." He added, "the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 and the victory over Saddam Hussein two years later were won at an incredibly low cost in historical terms".[8]

In 1999, Roberts published Salisbury: Victorian Titan, a biography of the Victorian era politician and then Prime MinisterRobert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury. Historian Michael Korda praised the work as "a masterpiece about one of the greatest and most able Tory political figures of the Victorian age".[12] The book additionally won the Wolfson History Prize and the James Stern Silver Pen Award for Non-Fiction. In September 2001, Napoleon and Wellington, an investigation into the relationship between the two generals, was published by Weidenfeld and Nicolson, and was the subject of the lead review in all but one of Britain's national newspapers.

January 2003 saw the publication of Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership. In the book, which addresses the leadership techniques of Hitler and Churchill, he delivered a rebuttal to many of the assertions made by Clive Ponting and Christopher Hitchens concerning Churchill.

An accompanying television series based around Roberts' Hitler and Churchill ran on BBC2, with its first episode being broadcast on 7 March 2013.[17] Roberts remarked that he felt grateful for the BBC's support of his work and their unwillingness to cut corners when it came to exploring history in detail, quipping as well about the group's wardrobe policy, "Courtesy of this programme, I now have two Armani suits upstairs."[10]

His A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900, a sequel to the four volume work of Churchill, was published in September 2006 and won the Intercollegiate Studies Institute Book Award. Masters and Commanders describes how four figures shaped the strategy of the West during the Second World War. It was published in November, 2008 and won the International Churchill Society Book Award and was shortlisted for two other military history book prizes. The Art of War is a two-volume chronological survey of the greatest military commanders in history. It was compiled by a team of historians, including Robin Lane Fox, Tom Holland, John Julius Norwich, Jonathan Sumption and Felipe Fernández-Armesto, working under the general editorship of Roberts.

The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War came out in August 2009. A detailed look at the history of events behind the Second World War and various key elements within it such as the nature of Nazi Germany's rule, the book received large popular success.[5] Being Roberts' best-known work to date, it reached number two in The Sunday Times bestseller list in particular. The book additionally earned the British Army Military Book of the Year award for 2010.[4]

In terms of critical response, The Storm of War has also received a wide variety of praise in publications such as The Daily Beast, where historian Michael Korda lauded it as written "superbly well" and stated that Roberts' "scholarship is superb",[12] and The Wall Street Journal, where historian Jonathan W. Jordan said that Roberts "splendidly weaves a human tragedy into a story".[21] Support also came from figures such as American political commentator Peter Robinson and fellow English historian Paul Johnson. In the book, the author aims to paint a concise yet highly detailed picture of the conflict in which he argues that dictators Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler both took terrible actions due to their repressive ideologies, throwing thousands and thousands of lives away in the process, yet the eventual defeat of the Axis powers constituted a moral triumph of democratic pluralism over authoritarianism that led the way to a better future.[5]

In 2014, Roberts published Napoleon the Great (the American edition is titled Napoleon: A Life), which was awarded the 2015 Los Angeles Times Book Prize for best biography. Published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books UK, (and by Viking Press in the US), the book attempts to give a fair-minded contemporary assessment of the life of Napoleon as well as his legacy for France and the rest of the western world. In this biography, Roberts seeks to evoke Napoleon's tremendous energy, both physical and intellectual, and the attractiveness of his personality, even to his enemies. The book argues against many long-held historical opinions, including the myth of a great romance with Joséphine. She took a lover immediately after their marriage, as Roberts shows, and Napoleon in fact had three times as many mistresses as he acknowledged. Roberts goes through fifty-three of Napoleon's sixty battlefields, and he additionally evaluates a gigantic new French edition of Napoleon's letters, aiming to create a complete re-evaluation of the man.[22]

Like Storm of War, Roberts's life of Napoleon received critical praise from a wide range of publications. For example, journalist Jeremy Jennings wrote for Standpoint in October 2014 that "Napoleon could have had few biographers more dedicated to their subject." Jennings additionally labelled the book a "richly detailed and sure-footed reappraisal of the man, his achievements— and failures— and the extraordinary times in which he lived".[22] The book earned the Prix du Jury des Grands Prix de la Fondation Napoléon for 2014, an award given by the historical organisation Fondation Napoléon.[23]

Praise additionally came from fellow historian Jay Winik: ‘With his customary flair and keen historical eye, Andrew Roberts has delivered the goods again. This could well be the best single volume biography of Napoleon in English for the last four decades. A tour de force that belongs on every history-lover’s bookshelf!’ [24] Historian Bernard Cornwell describes the book as 'Simply dynamite ... [Napoleon was] a mass of contradictions and Roberts's book encompasses all the evidence to give a brilliant portrait of the man. The book, as it needs to be, is massive, yet the pace is brisk and it's never overwhelmed by the scholarly research, which was plainly immense ... Roberts suggests looking at Europe for the Emperor's monument, but this magnificent biography is not a bad place to start.' [25]

In announcing in 2013 that it would present a three-part television series based on Roberts's analysis of Napoleon's life and legacy, BBC Two declared in its press release that "Roberts sets out to shed new light on the emperor... an extraordinary, gifted military commander and a mesmeric leader whose private life was littered with disappointments and betrayals."[26] However, the series has had mixed reviews. The Daily Telegraph declared it "unconvincing", saying "there was no getting away from Roberts’s regular lapses into hero-worship," and "Roberts’s remarks on the refreshing qualities of dictatorship made me wonder if he had taken leave of his senses".[27]

In 2018 Roberts produced a biography of Winston Churchill, entitled Churchill: Walking with Destiny (2018). The book was extremely well received. The Financial Times wrote that ‘Anecdotes sparkle like gems throughout Roberts’s book, an exhaustive but fluent text that draws on a wider range of sources than the typical Churchill biography.’ [28]. Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer included the book among the 'Books of the Year' and said that ‘Andrew Roberts triumphed over my skepticism with his riveting account of the extraordinary life of the most remarkable individual to have lived at No 10.’ [29]Stephen Pollard, in The Jewish Chronicle, was of the opinion that ‘Churchill is the most superb one-volume biography I have ever read — of anyone. Roberts manages something I thought impossible. He has given us a new, ground-breaking portrait of the man whom many consider to be the greatest ever Englishman. This is a simply wonderful book. A living, poetic, stirring yet thought-provoking portrait of a giant, it will be regarded as a classic for generations to come.’ [30]. The New York Times commented that 'All told, it must surely be the best single-volume biography of Churchill yet written.’ [31]. The National Book Review also noted that the book was '‘widely praised as the best single-volume biography of Winston Churchill ever written' and added that 'historian and commentator Roberts draws on previously unavailable journals and notes for the robust, engrossing, and nuanced history of the great British leader.’ [32].

During the autumn of 2013, Roberts served as the inaugural Merrill Family visiting professor in history at Cornell University. He taught a course entitled "Great European Leaders of the 19th and 20th Centuries and their Influence on History."[34] He's additionally spoke in many other American universities such as the University of Montana.[4]

Although Roberts's 2006 work A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900 won critical acclaim from some sections of the media,[35][36]The Economist drew attention to some historical, geographical and typographical errors, as well presenting a generally scathing review of the book. The newspaper referred to the work as "a giant political pamphlet larded with its author's prejudices".[6]

In May 2019, he glowingly reviewed Jacob Rees-Mogg's new book about eminent Victorians, describing it as “a full-throated, clear-sighted, well-researched and extremely well-written exposition of the Victorians and their values”. A book other reviewers have described as "staggeringly silly" and "absolutely abysmal".[42] The historian Dominic Sandbrook described the book as “terrible, so bad, so boring, so mind-bogglingly banal that if it had been written by anybody else it would never have been published”.[43]

Masters and Commanders: How Roosevelt, Churchill, Marshall and Alanbrooke Won the War in the West (2008), Allen Lane, ISBN978-0-7139-9969-3 (UK edition); Masters and Commanders: How Four Titans Won the War in the West, 1941–1945 (2009), Harper, ISBN978-0-06-122857-5 (US edition).

^Andrew Roberts (16 December 2010). A History of the English-Speaking Peoples since 1900. Orion. p. 278. ISBN978-0-297-86524-7. One way that the Left in the West has attempted to undermine its legacy is to try to argue that was a 'moral equivalence' between Soviet communism and English-speaking capitalism. Thus in 2004 the University of California Press published a book by Mark Dow entitled American Gulag and subtitled Inside US Immigration Prisons, and in 2005 a book entitled Britain's Gulag was published about British detention camps in Kenya, written by a Harvard historian named Caroline Elkins, whose blood-libels against Britain won her the Pulitzer Prize.